The January strike in Germany

On the morning of Monday 28 January 1918 the turners of the Berlin factories gave the signal to strike by beating hammers on the oxygen cylinders used for welding. Within a few hours the whole armaments industry of the capital had come to a halt. In the afternoon 414 delegates, representing some 400,000 strikers, met at the Berlin trade union house. It was the first political mass strike in Germany since the start of the war. According to the German Historical Museum about a million people across the Reich joined it, and their slogan was “Peace and bread!”.

The strike had been prepared by the so-called Revolutionary Stewards, a network of activists of the Berlin metalworkers’ union led by the turner Richard Müller, mostly linked to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. As early as April 1917 they had organised a great strike in the capital against a cut in the bread ration. They kept the date of 28 January secret, but a few days earlier it was revealed by a leaflet of the Spartacus League calling for an indefinite strike and describing the great strike in Vienna and other cities of Austria-Hungary. To the hunger of the third winter of the war was added disappointment at the negotiations at Brest, where General Max Hoffmann had spread out a map before Trotsky showing the German territorial demands. On 25 January the workers of the torpedo workshop in Kiel had already gone on strike, followed by most of the works there. According to Admiral Gustav Bachmann, 60,000–70,000 people were on strike there.

The assembly of delegates, chaired by Müller, unanimously adopted its demands. The first was a speedy peace without annexations or indemnities, with representatives of the workers of all countries taking part in the negotiations. Then came better food supplies, the lifting of the state of siege, the restoration of freedom of the press and of assembly, an end to military interference in trade union affairs and a thoroughgoing democratisation of the state. To begin with, the strikers demanded universal and equal suffrage, women included, for the Prussian diet. The three-class franchise in Prussia, the largest state of the Reich, was one of the main pillars of the old order. The delegates elected an eleven-member action committee, made up almost entirely of stewards, and invited three representatives of each of the two Social Democratic parties to join it. The Independents sent Hugo Haase, Georg Ledebour and Wilhelm Dittmann. The invitation to the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which supported the war, passed only after Müller intervened, by a majority of two votes. Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Otto Braun joined the committee on its behalf. In 1924 Ebert testified in court that he had joined the strike leadership only in order to calm it and bring it to an end as quickly as possible.

The strike spread to Hamburg, to Munich, where the strike in the munitions works was organised by the leader of the Bavarian Independents, Kurt Eisner, to the Ruhr and to many other centres. The government of Chancellor Georg von Hertling had no intention of talking to the workers. The very next day the military command of the Mark banned strike committees, and the State Secretary of the Interior, Max Wallraf, agreed to receive only the deputies Haase and Scheidemann, but not Müller and his comrade. On 30 January the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts was suspended. On 31 January an intensified state of siege was proclaimed in Berlin, meetings were broken up by the police, Dittmann was arrested and the largest factories were placed under military management. The strikers were given until 4 February to return to work, under threat of arrest or conscription. On 3 February the action committee called off the strike. None of the demands was met, and many workers, Müller himself among them, were sent to the front.

The January strike showed how weary of the war the Germans were, and it was a dress rehearsal for the workers’ council movement that was to play the leading role in the revolution of November 1918. Many of the councils that sprang up all over Germany at that time were modelled on the committee of 28 January. The participation of Ebert and Scheidemann in the leadership also had long-term consequences. The right later accused the Social Democrats of having stabbed the fighting army in the back in the decisive year of the war.